CHAPTER 14 BUILDING AND CONFIGURING CLASS LIBRARIES
At this point, you will see your *.snk file within the Solution Explorer (Figure 14-19). Every time you
build your application, this data will be used to assign a proper strong name to the assembly.
Figure 14-19. Visual Studio will now strongly sign your assembly with each compilation
Note Recall that the Application tab of the Properties editor provides a button named Assembly Information.
When clicked, the button displays a dialog box that allows you to establish numerous assembly-level attributes,
including the version number, copyright information, and so forth.
Installing Strongly Named Assemblies to the GAC
The final step is to install the (now strongly named) CarLibrary.dll into the GAC. While the preferred
way to deploy assemblies to the GAC in a production setting is to create a Windows MSI installer
package (or use a commercial installer program such as InstallShield), the .NET Framework 4.5 SDK
ships with a command-line tool named gacutil.exe, which can be useful for quick tests.
Note You must have administrator rights to interact with the GAC on your machine, which may including
adjusting the User Access Control (UAC) settings.
Table 14-1 documents some relevant options of gacutil.exe (specify the /? flag when you run the
program to see each option).
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